LBSA has its headquarters (HQ) in Tiong Bahru, and currently has three neighbourhood links (NLs): one in Ang Mo Kio, one in Bendemeer, and one in Mei Ling. The main business of LBSA is their Befriending programme, where volunteers all over the island are engaged to conduct home visits to seniors who are at risk of being socially isolated, with frequent activities such as dinners, outings, and ration distributions being conducted as well.

Their secondary business is their Outreach programme, where seniors living within the service boundaries of the three NLs are engaged in daily activities and courses within or just outside the premises of the NLs, to promote an active lifestyle and graceful aging among the elderly.

LBSA currently has around 1000 volunteers (Befrienders) and 1800 seniors (Befriendees) in their Befriending programme, while their Outreach programme also has around 1800 seniors but only 100 volunteers. Data is stored in a Microsoft Access database and many separate Excel sheets, and not synchronised between HQ and centres. Hence, an LBSA staff has to travel between HQ and centres monthly to synchronise the data, which is a very time-consuming job. Yet, their data is updated so rapidly that monthly synchronisation is not frequent enough to satisfy their needs, and the staff at various centres and HQ often end up resorting to calling each other for latest data because the information in their database is too outdated.

Additionally, crucial Befriending Programme data such as the matchings between volunteers and seniors and the details of activities conducted are stored in Access and Excel in such a way that makes tallying of figures for reporting quite tedious. For the Outreach Programme, taking of activity attendance is done manually on paper, so it is even harder to tally the figures for report generation. For each centre, it usually takes several working days per month to generate a single PES report. This significantly detracts from time that could be spent more meaningfully on directly helping the seniors. Hence, we need a system that can help them solve these problems and reduce the time spent on administrative work.

Our system helps LBSA to match volunteers to seniors and keep track of these matchings, producing statistics that indicate which areas are well taken care of and which need bolstering. This allows management staff to make better decisions in volunteer recruitment and deployment. Home visits to seniors by the volunteers are also recorded, and a running record of each senior can now be easily maintained, so as to allow staff and volunteers to better monitor the situation of each senior. In addition, where the previous Access database system of LBSA suffered from synchronisation problems and required one staff to travel to each of the 3 NLs every month to try and synchronise data, our system now ensures that all data is always up-to-date without any human labour required. Similar reports made to NCSS about the Befriending programme are now also automatic and accurate.

Our system also helps centres to track activity attendance for seniors without too much human labour. Generation of PES reports to be submitted to the National Council of Social Service (NCSS) can now be done quickly and accurately, where previously staff would have to spend hours or days going through paper records and tallying figures with a calculator.

• Jonathan Hay Zhi Yi, 3rd year student (Project Lead)
• Dominic Sim Kuangwei, 3rd year student (Project 2IC)
• Wang Youming, recently graduated (Senior Developer)
• Zhao Cong, 2nd year student (Developer)
• Dang Cao Khoa, 2nd year student (Developer)
• Nguyen Chi Dat, 2nd year student (Developer)
• Xu Xiaojiang, 2nd year student (Freelance Developer)

"This has easily been the most intensive learning experience in my university life. Never had I been in a situation when I had to pull off so much in so short a time - and without prior training or experience. In the grand scheme of things, my contribution to society should probably be considered little, but every little bit counts, and I hope that during these holidays I sacrificed, I have made a difference in the lives of other people."
- Jonathan

"Our clients have been very wonderful people, serving the society untiringly, and being able to help them was a very rewarding experience."
- Dominic

"I am very delighted to see that we can deliver a system that can benefit the society in a real way."
- Youming

"During the coding phase, we had to change the database schema and coding approach many times to fit the VWO’s requirements. We did have headache a lot of times but in general, we had happy times coding and learning together."
- Khoa

We would also like to thank the following people:

• Dr Ben Leong, who drilled and guided us through every step of the project, and helped us not only to become better software engineers in general, but also to learn some of the more important lessons in life.
• Dr Damith Rajapakse, who acted as a second mentor, and will undoubtedly in due time be guiding future generations in other community projects.
• YMCA team, who shared many project management tips and technical advice with us, and helped us in many areas of our project.
• Our various sponsors, without whom we would not be able to support ourselves financially through the duration of this project.
• McKinsey & Company, for providing us with training via their wonderful workshops.
• Our families and friends, for their love and support, even as they had to bear our late nights and tight schedules.